5% chance of infection, < 1% chance of hospital, 0.3%
by btd (2020-05-16 12:07:24)
Edited on 2020-05-16 12:12:25

In reply to: If little risk, why insist on a waiver of liability? *  posted by TerryD

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chance of death -- and that's with the high risk pool of people. For people under the age of 25, the death rate is below 0.1%. So, you have a 99.9% chance of not dying if you are a student at ND, even if you do get it. Better yet, you don't go home to the older people when you live at a college.

So, why force people to sign a waiver? Because 0.1% * 10,000 = 10. Those 10 will attempt to collect money. The waivers let the other 9,990 continue living their lives versus making all 10k suffer to protect the 10.

EDIT: Approximately 4 students die every year at ND. My brother was one of them in 1984, class of 1986. 6 died in his class. Point being, 10 is a sad number, but it's not radically out of range from what happens under the absolute normal use case.

Also -- above is with standard mitigation and ignores the fact that the death rate drops as treatments continue to evolve and a vaccine with partial affect will exist starting spring semester. Flu vaccines are only about 64% effective -- and 55k people die per year in the US -- so people should mentally adjust to accept this the same as flu even when a vaccine exists.

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